It only took about two hours to set up, and Mom of two Danielle has already earned nearly $300 this year with a few pieces of smart home technology and OhmConnect. The best part? She’ll keep earning all year long.

A new owner of a Hive Welcome Home pack -- the affordable suite of smart home technology -- Danielle now has everything she needs to adjust their home’s cooling, heating and lighting, turn her appliances on and off from wherever she is -- and earn money in the process.

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For example, she’s programmed the system so that when the motion sensor picks up motion after sunset, it turns a smart light on a warm setting at 30% - perfect ambiance for some late night reading.

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“I never considered myself to be a ‘techy’ person so the thought of setting up everything required for an energy-efficient, comfortable ‘smart home’ seemed a bit out of reach. With the Hive Welcome Home pack, it was all really straightforward and easy.”

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The system, which works with Alexa, Google Assistant, Philips Hue and IFTTT, can do things like:

Conserve energy by not cooling or heating an empty home

Schedule your Hive Active Plugs to turn appliances on or off automatically

Send you alerts when your Hive Motion Sensor detects movement in your home

Set the mood with lighting before you walk through the door

And perhaps most importantly, pay you for the energy your home doesn’t need when you connect it to your OhmConnect account

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How her smart home tech has already paid for itself - and then some

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“The best part about it was that it was practically free,” she explained. “Actually, it was better than free - it’s now paying ME!”

Danielle has connected her smart home tech to her OhmConnect account and now she gets paid for the energy she doesn’t using during “#OhmHours” - times when California would rather pay its residents to conserve energy than power up additional power plants when demand is high.

“I’ve made $290 this year alone by connecting my Hive pack and my OhmConnect account. We participate in #OhmHours sometimes without even realizing it because our thermostat and smartplugs take care of it all on our behalf.”

Any doubts she had about smart home technology being complicated or unaffordable have been wiped from her mind since taking the leap to try a Hive setup.

“I had read things about more efficient thermostats helping to save money on our energy bills, but I had no idea I could actually earn money. That totally changed the game for me.”

Katie is an award-winning journalist and digital strategist with more than 10 years of experience in print and digital media and a passion for the environment and fighting climate change. Prior to joining OhmConnect, she was a digital content strategist and writer for Environmental Defence and WWF-Canada. While envious of her colleagues in sunny California, she’s a Canadian at heart and lives with her husband in Toronto, Ontario.